The historical episode is where Doctor Who usually gets comfortable: frock coats, a famous person, a monster in the cellar, home by teatime. “Thin Ice” has the frock coats and the monster, and then spends its runtime being considerably more pointed than the format normally allows, about who gets eaten, who profits, and what a time traveller is actually for. It’s the best of the season’s opening run and it belongs almost entirely to Pearl Mackie.
The last frost fair
The setting is a genuine gift: London, 1814, the Thames frozen solid, and a fair on the ice, with elephants, printing presses, wrestling booths, food stalls, the lot. It’s beautifully realised, and it’s used properly rather than as wallpaper. The fair is a place where the city’s poorest come to make a shilling and where nobody counts the children, which is exactly the sort of environment where people can disappear without anyone official noticing. The green lights moving under the ice, drawing people to a spot before the surface gives way, are a simple and effective bit of horror. And there is something enormous chained beneath the river, not a monster in the sense of a predator that got loose but a creature deliberately imprisoned and deliberately fed, because its droppings burn hotter than any fuel on Earth and a man has worked out how to sell them.
Before any of that, though, the episode does something the show has been oddly reluctant to do for fifty years: it lets a Black companion ask what going into the past actually means for her. Bill raises it immediately, and directly, and the Doctor doesn’t wave it away. She asks whether it’s safe. She notices that the crowd is far more mixed than the costume dramas ever suggested, and the episode’s line about history being whitewashed rather than white is the sharpest thing anyone has said in this programme in a while. She also asks the question most of these episodes dodge: whether she’ll be treated badly, and what he’ll do about it. What makes it work is that it isn’t a lecture. It’s two people having a practical conversation about a real logistical problem, and then getting on with the adventure. The show has taken companions to the past for decades while carefully arranging never to notice this, and addressing it in ninety seconds and moving on is more effective than a special episode about it would have been. It also pays off. When Lord Sutcliffe finally appears and greets Bill with a racist remark, the Doctor punches him in the face, immediately, without discussion. It’s a genuinely satisfying moment, and the episode is smart enough not to make it about the Doctor’s virtue, because he does it, then they get on with stopping him, and nobody congratulates anybody.
Sutcliffe
Nicholas Burns plays Sutcliffe as something better than a moustache-twirler: a bored young industrialist who has inherited a business and finds the whole thing rather tedious. The genius of the character is how small he is. He isn’t a mastermind. He’s the fourth generation of a family that found a chained creature under a river and built a fuel company on it, and he’d frankly rather be somewhere warm. He lures the poor onto the ice with a fair because they’re the ones nobody will look for, and when the Doctor confronts him about the arithmetic, how many lives per ton, he genuinely doesn’t understand why it’s a question. They’re cheap. The fuel isn’t. That’s a much more useful villain than a lunatic with a plan, because he’s recognisable. The episode’s real subject is the ordinary machinery of exploitation: something enormous in chains, a product, and a class of people whose deaths never appear on anyone’s ledger.
The street children are handled with the same lack of sentiment. Bill befriends a pickpocket called Spider, who is bright and funny and entirely unbothered about robbing her, and who goes through the ice within about ten minutes of meeting her. The episode doesn’t linger or score it. He’s simply gone, and Bill’s shock at how little anyone around her reacts is the point being made. It also sets up the exchange that defines the episode. She asks the Doctor how many people he’s seen die, and then how many he’s killed, and he tells her the truth: that he’s stopped counting, and that if he let himself grieve every one properly he’d never be able to save the next. Capaldi delivers it flatly, as a working practice rather than a confession. It’s the least flattering thing this Doctor has ever said about himself and the episode lets it stand without comfort.
The test
The best scene is the one where the Doctor refuses to decide. Faced with the choice of freeing the creature, which will break the ice and may kill people on it, or leaving it chained and profitable, he hands the decision to Bill. Not as a trick, and not as a lesson exactly. He tells her that it isn’t his planet and won’t be his future, and that she has to be the one to say. Capaldi plays it as a man who has made too many of these calls and is genuinely unsure whether he should be trusted with another. And Bill, appalled at first, works out that this is the actual job, that travelling with him means being the person who decides, and living with it. There’s also a lovely, hard little speech earlier where the Doctor tells her that outrage is not a strategy: that he has been alive long enough to be angry about everything, and that being angry is not the same as being useful. It’s the most concise statement of what this incarnation believes that the show has produced, and it sits oddly well next to the machine logic of Smile a week earlier, where nobody was angry about anything and that was the whole problem.
The ending is pleasingly unsentimental about the aftermath. Sutcliffe dies in the ice he was farming, and rather than leave his estate to be inherited by someone equally awful, the Doctor forges a will handing the lot to the street children who survived, and the closing scene is a family of former pickpockets living in his house. It’s a small, satisfying piece of redistribution, and the episode is careful not to present it as justice. It’s a workaround, cheerfully criminal, and nobody involved pretends the system produced it.
Rating: 4/5. Sharp, confident and morally serious without ever stopping to congratulate itself, with the strongest guest villain of the season and a superb Regency setting. The creature itself is more concept than character and the final act resolves a shade too neatly, but this is the episode where Bill becomes a genuinely great companion and where the Twelfth Doctor’s ethics get stated plainly. Something enormous in chains under the river, a fair on the ice above it, and a young man who simply couldn’t see why any of it was a problem.